Ancient Fire is the name of my brand of homemade wines, meads, ciders & beers. Under that name I also write articles on my projects, wines from around the world, food & pairing, the wine business, wineries, travel and all things I enjoy in this life. -- Jason

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Prone to Experiment

( Pinot Noir fermenting.)

I get asked all the time “when are you going to open your
own winery?” Well, I’m not sure, and maybe never.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, launching
your own winery is capital intensive, weather dependent with dynamic cash
flows. You start (and start over if you work in another industry like me) poor
and can’t expect to do better than be comfortable in the long run. Oh, and you
work all the time. Those are the truths and realities that every small winery owner
has shared with me when I ask about it. There are options in bringing investors
on or ramping up production of average quality plonk and trying to grab market
share with it, but neither offer the owner anymore true benefits and of course come
with their own headaches. All of this amounts to a potentially scary leap, but
one that I would take when and if the time was right.

The bigger reason, and it is one I have come to more
recently, that I haven’t made this leap yet is because I tend to be very “creative”
in my beverage making. I am prone to experiment, and that isn’t as bankable as
developing a line of products that you can make consistently and develop a
following for. That’s not to say my tendencies aren't bankable, but the path to growth is
more difficult when you are mixing it up all the time. Right or wrong many
potential customers want to become familiar with your products so that they may
return to them frequently, and distribution channels are going to look to place
orders for successful products consistently. With my experimental bent that
isn’t going to be so easy.

( The krausen on a Wit beer. )

I’m not bothered by any of this. Why? Because I have fun
doing what I do without the commercial hangups. Here is a perfect example. Every
Spring I pick dandelions in Vermont. This year I have two experimental batches
going, one a wine and the other a mead. Both batches were made with new or
modified recipes so they are by no means sure things. The safety of the small
batch is on my side, and I learn a lot this way; so I keep doing it. It is worth
noting that dandelion wine isn’t as commercially viable as other types of both
standard and non-standard wines due to labor intensive processes, and it isn’t
a fan favorite either.

This wide open experimentation is simply me riffing on the inspiration
I get form a variety of sources. Commercial tastings are great source of
inspiration; new styles and flavors tend to stick with me. Any time spent with
the homebrew club I joined in 2011 is guaranteed to expose me to new
techniques, styles and provide lots of opportunity for feedback on my own
creations. Tastings held at home or at friend’s houses provide even more
opportunity to engage new people on what they like to drink and how they go
about discovering new beverages. I am particularly excited for the WineMaker
Magazine Annual Conference in a few weeks. We can drive this year which means
we can cart along a whole lot of bottles to share. The feedback I will get,
much of it brutally objective from people who are more talented than I, will be
worth much more than the wine I will see disappear from my cellar.

( Dry Creek Chardonnay undergoing lees aging and battonage. )

This year will be littered with experiments, meads made with
tea, hops and herbs, new styles of beer that we’ve (my wife is on the beer
tangent with me) never made before and some wine, but what exactly hasn’t even
been considered. Another great example can be found in the preceding sentence.
I will make more beer and mead in 2012 than wine. My experimentation is taking
me away from wine for a bit, something I couldn’t do as easily in a commercial
setting. I am finding significant learning opportunities in these projects,
both in the process of making them but also about how they are perceived when I
share them. That learning is just too good to pass up by
making the same things as I did last year.

( A room full of fermenters. More experiments that need attention! )

My thanks go out to all the people who ask me about going pro,
and when this is the immediate reaction to tasting my wines it really does feel
good, but I don’t think it is going to happen anytime soon. What I can tell you
is that I am developing a treasure trove of information on how to successfully
make good beverages at home, how to use them in your dining and entertaining
and a lot about what people like and don’t like in a beverage. No matter what I
end up doing I expect the knowledge I can develop from all of that will be a
huge asset.